It sounds like the set-up to a comedy, and to be sure, writer/director Kristoffer Borgli (himself, the cause of controversy, given his recent admission to dating a teenager when he was a decade older than she), plays a lot of this material for uneasy laughs. The wedding scene itself, at the end, is a sort of culmination of everyone’s bad choices in the most public of spectacles (Charlie makes an absolutely ghastly wedding speech resulting, in part, by him getting his nose broken by an angry guest), with various turns of the screw. 

If this feels a bit contrived  —  and I certainly wouldn’t blame you if it did  —  that’s essentially the spirit of this achingly convivial sci-fi caper, directed by the team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Clone High, The Lego Movie, and the Spiderverse films), from a screenplay by Drew Goddard, based on a novel by Andy Weir (The Martian). As with the previous adaptation of Weir’s work, it’s a film that gleefully presents basic scientific principles and logic clumsily sewn together with a story and outlook that feels very much like something an enterprisingly affable 15-year-old might come up with while daydreaming in Physics class. 

...makes a strong case for how the system is broken and people suffer as a result.

Working from a fusty script by writing duo Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, who wrote a previous installment of the Friday the 13th series, Raimi goes deep in his bag of tricks  —  comic fish-eye perspectives; extreme close-ups; POV cameras hurtling through jungle terrain; extreme and ludicrous gore  —  to keep things going, but the indecisive screenplay simply won’t allow for the full Raimi experience.